The crystal
football representing the 2012 BCS national championship rests proudly
alongside the two others won by Nick Saban's Alabama football program in the Crimson
Tide's athletic department. How much longer it remains there may now be in
question.

With the
revelations of Wednesday's Yahoo! Sports report of impermissible benefits
allegedly given to former Alabama offensive tackle D.J. Fluker, vacation of
that national title - the Crimson Tide's third in the last four years - could be
a possibility if the NCAA confirms the report.

John
Infante, a former compliance official at Loyola Marymount and Colorado State
and author of the Bylaw Blog for AthleticScholarships.net, said there are two
thresholds of potential penalties. The higher of those thresholds, he said,
would likely require some institutional knowledge that the infractions were
taking place and failure to address them. This is where the terms "failure to
monitor" and "lack of institutional control" come into play, along with significant
scholarship losses and postseason bans.

The lower
threshold, however, may require only confirmation of the allegations presented
in the Yahoo! report - that Fluker at various times in 2012 accepted money from
former Crimson Tide player Luther Davis, now a runner for several sports
agents. And it's this lower threshold that would result in the vacation of any
games in which Fluker played after receiving the benefits -- including the national championship win
over Notre Dame.

"If he
received an extra benefit prior to that game or prior to the season or anytime
during the season, he would normally be considered ineligible from the time he
received the benefit," Infante said. "I think there's still a little bit of
uncertainty exactly what the standard is when it comes to whether or not the school
needed to know or had reason to know that the player was ineligible when they
put him on the field.

"Even
without the more severe violations, (vacation of games) definitely would be a
penalty on the table if they found the player received the benefits."

Confirming
that, however, may be easier said than done - as the NCAA found out in its
investigation of Texas A&M quarterback Johnny Manziel this summer. Manziel
allegedly accepted payment from memorabilia dealers for signing helmets and
other items, but the brokers who made those charges in the media declined to
cooperate with the NCAA and Manziel was ultimately suspended for only a half of
the Aggies' season opener.

Infante said
the NCAA, which has no subpoena power, could be similarly dependent on the
cooperation of individuals outside its jurisdiction in order to confirm the
Yahoo report, which also named former Mississippi State players Fletcher Cox
and Chad Bumphis, former Tennessee quarterback Tyler Bray and current Tennessee
defensive tackle Maurice Couch.

The case,
Infante said, could easily come down to whether Davis or other witnesses with
knowledge or evidence of the transactions will cooperate.

"Assuming
everything breaks well for the NCAA, this looks to be fairly easy to
investigate. Now again, so did Miami," Infante said, alluding to the Nevin
Shapiro case at Miami that is still awaiting a ruling. "The biggest thing is it's
relatively isolated. You're talking about a very short period of time,
relatively speaking, compared to something like the Miami investigation. You're
talking about a limited number of athletes and you're talking about one person,
it appears, who can connect all these dots and has a lot of documentation.

"If that
individual decides to talk to the NCAA, this could be very easy."

If not, this
could be very difficult - even though the Yahoo! report includes references to
detailed documentation linking Fluker and the others to transactions with
Davis.

"Three of
these athletes are no longer involved in college athletics, so the NCAA can't
make them talk," Infante said. "The NCAA still, I believe, would need to get
their hands on the original copies of those documents. They can't go print off
Yahoo!'s report and take it to the Committee on Infractions.

"When the
documentation is in the control of someone the NCAA has no jurisdiction over,
it's really about whether they're willing to give it to them."

Even so,
former Marshall compliance official David Ridpath, now an assistant professor of
sports administration at Ohio University, doesn't believe the NCAA, with a
dwindling enforcement staff and another potential investigation looming at
Oklahoma State after a similarly damaging report from Sports Illustrated, will
be able to drop the hammer.

"Considering
the Manziel situation and how overwhelmed they are with the Oklahoma State
situation, I don't think a whole lot is going to come out of it," he said. "I
think the NCAA has painted themselves into a box with Manziel. You've seen a
lot of inconsistencies and a real reticence on the part of the NCAA to follow
through on punishments they've given to others through the years."

While analogies
have been drawn between Alabama's situation and that of USC, which was forced
to vacate the 2004 national title, forfeit 30 scholarships and miss two years
of postseason play when Reggie Bush was found to have accepted impermissible
benefits that year, Infante said Alabama's case does not appear to be as
damaging.

"With USC, a
lot of that came out of tying the violation, the actual receipt of the money, to
an assistant coach that the NCAA argued not only knew about it but also sort of
facilitated it, and also the ... short-staffed compliance office there was
something that was brought up in that report," Infante said. "Given Alabama's
compliance track record of the last few years, given some of the penalties we've
seen in the case of North Carolina where there was even heavier involvement of
a coach, I wouldn't bet on there being anything of the severity of USC. I would
say something like what happened with North Carolina would be more kind of a
worst-case scenario, in terms of significant but not crippling scholarship
losses and if there's a bowl ban, it's more likely to be one year than two or
three."

The NCAA hit
North Carolina with a one-year bowl ban, a loss of 15 scholarships and three
years of probation in 2012 after finding the school responsible for multiple
violations, including academic fraud and failure to monitor its football
program. That was over and above self-imposed penalties from UNC that included
the vacation of all 16 of its wins in 2008 and 2009.

The
opportunity for Alabama, Tennessee and Mississippi State to self-report has likely
passed, Infante said, leaving "above and beyond" cooperation as the schools'
best course of action to minimize potential penalties - if there are any.

"The NCAA,
in their defense, is going to have to play catch-up because all these media
outlets have done a pretty decent job on things that should have been
self-reported to the NCAA or the NCAA found out themselves," Ridpath said. "They
need to ask questions of Alabama: What did you know, did you know it all, and
if you didn't, should you have known it? There's a lot of smoke there."